Accompanied with the blooming development of wireless communication technologies, various mobile communication apparatuses, e.g., mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), with all sorts of functions, have become indispensable tools in the daily life of the modern people.
Since a mobile communication apparatus has an advantage of being readily portable, the length of its total standby time is naturally an issue that a user pays much attention to. Most mobile communication apparatuses are defined with an idle mode, or also commonly referred to as a waiting mode, under which a mobile communication apparatus activates a communication with a base station at a predetermined interval (e.g., 470.73 ms on GSM DRX2) when the mobile communication apparatus is not in use by the user for mobile communication. Under such an idle mode, the foregoing interval is defined as a standby period, and an active time when communicating with the base station is defined as an active period.
FIG. 1 shows a schematic diagram illustrating a relationship between time and power consumption of a conventional mobile communication apparatus under an idle mode. As shown, when the mobile communication apparatus is under an idle mode, it only activates a communication with a base station at an interval of hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds, i.e., standby period t2, depending on the carrier's specifications, while an active period t1 of the mobile communication apparatus is extremely short at only approximately several milliseconds. Via the short communication period, the mobile communication apparatus calibrates time and frequency with the base station, adjusts power at transmitting and receiving terminals, determines whether to proceed with the hand-over with the base station, and checks whether there are incoming calls. When check results show that the base station receives no incoming calls intended for the mobile communication apparatus, the mobile communication apparatus terminates the communication with the base station and re-enters the standby period t2. As observed from the diagram, it is apparent that a power consumption peak P1 within the active period t1 reaches as high as hundreds of mA or tens of mA. In contrast, during the standby period t2, a power consumption P0 is quite low as being several mA or hundreds of μA since the mobile communication apparatus only needs to keep a timing controller activated for counting while other components may be temporarily turned off.
It is to be noted that a common user is unlikely to spend much time on talking on the mobile communication apparatus, and thus the time that the mobile communication apparatus operates under the idle mode is relatively high in ratio. Therefore, a total standby time of the mobile communication apparatus can be prolonged when power consumption of the mobile communication apparatus during the standby period is lowered. In addition, for the reason that the power consumption peak P1 within the active period t1 is far higher than the power consumption P0 during the standby period t2, the total standby time of the mobile communication apparatus can be further lengthened if the total power consumption during the active period t1 of the mobile communication apparatus is reduced.
With reference to FIG. 2 and FIG. 3, common approaches for reducing the total power consumption during the active period t1 of the mobile communication apparatus are to shorten the active period t1 to t1′, or to lower the power consumption peak P1 during the active period t1 to P1′. However, outcomes yielded by such approaches are still unsatisfactory. By taking alternatives into consideration, supposing an approach of directly omitting the active period t1 is adopted, the mobile communication apparatus has no means of learning whether there are incoming calls; supposing an approach of simply extending the standby period t2 is adopted, the mobile communication apparatus shall be delayed in being informed about incoming calls and hence a caller shall also wait for a longer period before the call is connected through—these alternatives can hardly be accounted as appropriate solutions.
Therefore, it is an objective of the present disclosure to provide a wireless communication system, a mobile communication apparatus and an operating method thereof to address the abovementioned shortcomings associated with the conventional solutions.